FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones stopped in at the Naples, Florida mansion owned by Ohio’s most senior utility regulator – the recipient of Jones’ alleged $4.3 million bribe four months prior – for a private conversation, an executive who was present at the meeting testified Tuesday.
Dennis Chack, a FirstEnergy senior vice president, kept his office down the hall from Jones. He called him a friend and colleague for decades as he walked jurors through different intersections between the CEO and Sam Randazzo, the regulator accused of taking money under the table.
For the prosecutors, Chack’s testimony adds to a picture of secret meetings and a cozy relationship between two wealthy men – a company CEO, and the regulator he’s accused of paying off.
In April 2019, Jones, Chack, and John Skory, a company vice president, flew to Florida on the company jet and dropped into Randazzo’s home – a $12 million property with a pool just off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico – for a drink.
There, Chack testified, they discussed several regulatory issues pending at the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the company, all of which would be funded through FirstEnergy’s two million Ohio electric customers’ bills. The conversation occurred despite rules prohibiting regulators from discussing active cases with companies.
Eventually, Jones asked that Chack and Skory leave the room and allow Randazzo and Jones a private conversation. Chack and Skory obliged and shot the breeze on Randazzo’s dock for 10 minutes, making time to check out his boat until Jones and Randazzo returned.
After the meeting, Chack said he asked Jones what the company’s status was with Randazzo.
“He just says he’s a good friend of the company,” Chack said.
Chack also explained to jurors a text message Jones sent him months later, promising that Randazzo “will get it done for us, but cannot just jettison all process.” There’s talk at the PUCO, Jones said in the text, “about does he work there or work for us?”
$1.8 million embezzlement scheme professed
But some of Chack’s most explosive claims were withheld from jurors. Chack signed a nonprosecution agreement with the federal government that, as described by a lawyer for Jones, admits to an embezzlement scheme with his daughter, Denise Angerstein, and Tony George, a local businessman. Neither has been charged with crimes or otherwise accused of wrongdoing.
“It includes his admission of a $1.8 million embezzlement scheme against FirstEnergy,” said Carole Rendon, an attorney for Jones, to Judge Susan Baker Ross about Chack’s agreement.
That agreement, which was publicly explained by lawyers who have read it but not disclosed in full to onlookers, also claims that Jones asked Chack to lie to company investigators about the whole affair.
George, on a brief phone call Tuesday evening, agreed to look over a transcript and excerpts detailing the descriptions of him. He didn’t respond to further inquiries.
What the jurors heard
For 51 years, Chack worked at FirstEnergy. He knew Jones for about 30 of them. They worked, played golf and vacationed together with their families. Chack, who struck deals with two levels of government to testify against Jones, said he didn’t know if they were still friends or not today.
Chack said he recalled Jones telling him in late 2018 that Randazzo would be the next PUCO chairman and he’d be great at it. The rosy outlook came as a surprise to Chack, given Randazzo, as a private lawyer, always represented the big industrial companies looking for cheaper electricity from FirstEnergy and other utilities. In other words, Randazzo was the opposition.
“I asked if Sam [Randazzo] doesn’t get the job, who would you want?” Chack testified. “He says no worries, Sam Randazzo is gonna get the job.”
In January 2019, FirstEnergy, via Jones and Mike Dowling, a senior vice president on trial alongside the CEO, executed a $4.3 million payment to a company wholly owned by Randazzo. Prosecutors say it’s a bribe.
The defense attorneys have argued it was a settlement payment intended for Randazzo’s legal clients to close out the tab on a settlement from 2015. However, Randazzo allegedly stole the money without his clients’ knowledge – a claim supported by a former client in testimony. Randazzo died by suicide in 2024 while facing state and federal charges.
Chack was leading FirstEnergy’s project to win a Competitive Retail Electric Service license, allowing the company to act as a seller of electricity and not just a deliverer. This required approval from the PUCO. And the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, a state agency that fights for cheaper electric prices for residential customers, warned that granting the license would undermine corporate separation laws that protect against monopolistic behavior from utilities.
Chack and Jones flew with their wives to Florida on the company plane (Chack, like Jones and Randazzo, kept a home nearby). Chack said he brought the issue up with Jones on the flight and asked him to broach the issue with Randazzo. It was on a separate trip to Florida with Jones that the company men met with Randazzo at his home.
Such agreements between a party on active PUCO cases and the agency’s chairman are known as “ex parte” and generally forbidden so that all parties have equal access to the regulators. It’s a base-level legal rule designed to protect fairness and equal treatment under the law.
“Two or three weeks later, it got through,” Chack testified.
On cross examination, Rendon, Jones’ attorney, asked Chack about discrepancies between his testimony Tuesday and statements made in a separate legal action in which he challenged his firing from FirstEnergy. For instance, Chack indicated at some points that he couldn’t overhear the conversation between Jones and Randazzo before he was asked to leave, while describing their subject matter in others.
The license is on the smaller end of the scale of the fruits of the alleged bribe scheme. As PUCO chairman, Randazzo took several actions toward FirstEnergy’s financial gain. He also lobbied, under the prestige of an ostensibly neutral office, in support of legislation that forced all Ohioans to bail out FirstEnergy’s failing nuclear plants in Ohio with $1.3 billion through their electric bills. (The legislation was frozen and eventually repealed as the investigations and prosecutions unfurled.)
What the jurors didn’t hear
The parties clashed Monday over whether prosecutors could ask Chack questions about his self-professed embezzlement scheme in front of jurors.
Judge Susan Baker Ross didn’t issue a verbal ruling Monday, and there’s no written ruling on the court docket as of Tuesday evening. But prosecutors didn’t ask Chack about any $1.8 million scheme during his testimony and only hinted to jurors about his other interactions with law enforcement.
But Rendon read portions of the agreement, verbatim. In Chack’s basement, the agreement states, Jones told Chack he was asked about three payments – $400,000, $175,000 and $150,000 to George.
“Jones told Chack he lied to the attorneys and told them he did not know anything about those transactions,” Rendon, Jones’ lawyer said, reading aloud from the agreement.
“Jones then told Chack that Chack needed to say the same thing when he talks to the board of directors and FirstEnergy’s attorneys, that is, that Jones did not know anything about the payments.”
Rendon called the story “completely outlandish” at best, and irrelevant. She said it’s a cheap ploy to suggest that Jones is a liar, and therefore “the type of person who would bribe Sam Randazzo and lie about that too.”
Assistant Attorney General Matt Meyer said the agreement also includes an admission that Chack backdated a contract, at Jones’ behest.
“FirstEnergy board members found out about [it] when they hired lawyers to ask about it, and Mr. Chack admitted to that conduct, and whatever the heck it was he did with Tony George and how the defense wants to characterize it,” he said.
The prosecutors wanted to include the testimony because it would get Chack to testify about an October 2020 visit from Jones to Chack’s home. Jones, then in the crosshairs of an FBI that had implicitly accused him of bribing ex-Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, showed up in a black hoodie under cover of night, according to the state. Jones urged Chack to lie to lawyers hired by FirstEnergy’s board of directors in an internal investigation, according to company records and Chack’s agreements with prosecutors.